Alan Gutierrez

Lance Hill sent me a link to another article by Adam Nossiter in the New York Times. Nossiter is off drinking at the trough of Uptown’s conventional wisdom in his article Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council.

There is a post at Think New Orleans called Is Adam Nossiter a Tool? That question stands. I don’t want to write a new article about the matter, but rather have people continue to discuss the issue under the existing article. What I really want is a website that will allow me to feature this article once again, or rather bring this subject up in the context of the conversations that took place before. It is very important to preserve both the existing discussion and the timeline of events.

Which is something that is common to most of my civic writing. I do want to encourage participation in the conversation, so I want to resurrect the existing conversation, with the exisiting participants. Most people subscribe to email notifications of comments of a particular post. To notify them that Adam Nossiter is banging on about race and quoting Greg Rigamer, I need to continue the discussion under the previous post.

Although, I’m pleased that WordPress is now performing acceptably, both blogs and Wikis fail to make my efforts in New Orleans easier.

On the Internet you only ever preach to the choir, or you pander to the trolls. That’s your choice. You either speak to the like minded who find your message through the magic of the long tail or the hateful spoilers who find your message through that exact same magic. I can feel it when I write. I can feel the trolls. I know they will arrive to leave silly little troll droppings, and I preempt them in my writing. They see it and spew. I’ve got to feel the choir. To write directly for the choir. Kick the trolls. Invite the opposing views.

“I also realized—and this was more important to me—that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect.” from an Inteview with David Simon the creator, writer and produce of HBO’s The Wire.

I feel good about this DailyKos thing.

My expectations for YearlyKos were middling. I had not read DailyKos. Not in a long time. When I did read DailyKos, it was only when a right wing blog pointed out something crazy in the comments. To me, DailyKos was part of the blue versus red realm of the blogosphere. I expected to wander about, listening to extreme views and smiling politely. Or else, I might be treated to endless introspection, “what does the blogosphere all mean?” variety.

There were two sorts at the YearlyKos. There were operators, people who work in politics, who have an agenda and can’t be bothered with small talk.

Then there was everyone else. I liked these people. They were very easy to speak with. They were concerned with the economy and the war.

The Ann Arbor Art Fair came and went recently. I heard tell of it in the Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop mailing list. At the Ann Arbor Art Fair they have a block running from Huron to Division along Liberty where people can have booths for political organizations. They have the Washetenaw Democrats and the Washtenaw Republicans and the Huron Valley Humane Society. That’s about it for normal. Everything else is peace thorough better breathing, marxism, and male circumcision. Everything else was Ann Arbor getting it’s weird on.

It would be an annual highlight in a city that held little of interest for me. To nod appreciatively with a knit brow while someone unraveled their conspiracy theories.

That was my point of reference.

But, that is not YearlyKos. The focus was on heath care, education, job creation and trade, on the domestic front. On foreign policy, people talked about Iraq, Iran, China, and the transparent wedge issue of Mexican immigration.

If this is the left wing of the Democratic Party, then the entire party has drifted to the center.

That is going to be my programming project tomorrow. Putting my asides in the sidebar of the index page. I’d like to have categories breakout out with a main content channel and asides. I want my asides to be permitted to be longer than one paragraph as well. Asides are also called life streams. For added effect it could be animated on mouse over, or it could scroll itself.

Read Hugh MacLeod’s post on The Pourous Membrane after Dave Coustan told me that he used the image in a presentation on corporate blogging. Read through the concept, then consider how it applies to Louisiana politics. We talk about transparency, a word that has become as meaningless as empowerment. What we need is permeability. In Louisiana, the membrane between the internal conversation and the external conversation is made of latex.

Here is a dashed off list of things to like about Twitter.

1. You stay connected without disconnecting from the world around you. I’m not a Blackberry user yet, but this shows me the appeal. I don’t mind stopping in the street to Tweet. I don’t feel like a self-absorbed cell phone user, filling the air with half a conversation.
2. Twitter is an effective digression. It is keeping me productive by giving me an outlet that is finite. Rather than check CNN or BBC, and get lost for hours. I read the recent Tweets.
3. No title. That is wonderfully liberating. You do not have to think about a title. You simply have to think about your short, 140 character message. You simply tweet.
4. Narrowcasting at it’s narrowest. I enjoy little updates on other people’s days. I like basic tweets about what a person is doing. It is good to know that Mitten is listing to her ten year old expound on storytelling, that Dave Coustan is eating apple slices for dinner, that Edward Vielmetti is toying with Twitter as a to do list.
5. There are no tasks in Twitter. It is not an inbox. I do not have to dread opening it. No place to inject an obligation in 140 characters.

Edward Vielmetti sent me a link to Hurricanes at Twitter. Which might be reason enough for you to join, if you are a New Orleanian.

Karen Gadbois strikes me as the right person to spur Twitter adoption in New Orleans. She’s a master of the away mesage. She posts away messages in GMail that make you wonder what’s up. It’s never with a link either, so you have to look at the Northwest Carrollton blog, search Google or NOLA.com, or simply send her a message and ask.

I don’t know if she’s proficent at text messaging, but the web interface is simple enough. I’d like to get one key New Orleans denizen going, because our away message network works pretty well for us.

With a few key people, a New Orleans Twitter network could do a lot to keep tabs on our shifty government.

I’m thinking about having a daily post called New Orleans Stories at Think New Orleans. It would be an update in the style of the Rojo update. A sentance and a link. Because most of the outlets here want you to stay in their website, my offering will be unique for New Orleans. At first I thought Crescent City Stories, but I want the Google Juice that comes from New Orleans. Who searches for Crescents? What other word matters? New Orleans Recovery? New Orleans Neighborhoods? Does it matter at all, so long as New Orleans is part of it? One would assume bost the ranking for any search that includes New Orleans, like, New Orleans Recovery School District. Of course, the best SEO rule to follow is to just be explicit.